Dear Colleague:
In baseball, how long do you think a team would survive if all the owner did was hire top notch players and send them out on the field to win the World Series without managers and coaches who possess all the necessary talents to maximize the players potentials? Without a doubt, the team would not succeed.
How does a top-notch hitter improve his batting? How does a top-notch pitcher improve his pitching? How does a top-notch fielder improve his fielding?
Each of these players has a manager and coach who knows the strengths and weaknesses of his players and thus devises a training schedule to enhance strengths and reduce weaknesses. This training schedule varies throughout the season depending upon the player’s present condition, and the winning manager knows how to adjust this training accordingly.
There is, however, something a manager cannot do, and that is to take someone who has little, if any, ability to play ball and train him enough to turn him into a professional player. So there is a screening process employed by team owners and managers to make sure that any player they hire possesses a minimum level of competence to play ball at a professional level. In addition to the physical conditioning, the manager must also understand and evaluate the behaviors and mental attitudes of the player.
To have any chance at success, both the manager and player must have a realistic understanding of the player’s strengths and weaknesses – physical, mental and emotional. Then they jointly devise a plan to increase strengths and reduce weaknesses throughout the season. In short, managers, coaches and players have to “buy into” what needs to be done. Manager, coach and player must execute the plan – a training program – in concert. Intending to do it is the epitaph of every loser.
To summarize -- A group of people become a winning professional ball team by following six simple steps:
1. A management team screens potential team members via scouting reports and team tryouts. The bottom line in the screening is, “Does this person have the skills to be a contributing member of our professional team from day one?”
2. A manager knows the strengths and weakness of each of his players.
3. A qualifying player is knowledgeable and realistic about his own strengths and weaknesses and views this awareness of himself as a way to improve his game.
4. A manager and a player jointly devise a training schedule to increase the strengths and reduce the weaknesses.
5. A manager and a player follow through and execute the jointly created plan for improving the abilities of the player throughout the season.
6. A manager then monitors his players during the entire season, always looking to compare the player’s current performances against past strengths and weaknesses. The manager is prepared to make adjustments to the plan and provide individualized coaching as needed.
Each of these six steps applies equally well to a successfully run business that employs salespeople and sales managers. Replace the word “player” with “salesperson.” There is no difference at all with what must be done for a business to be successful and have a team of professionals that knows how to win and does win.
The only way to have a professional sales force is to screen out those who do not have the minimum level of sales ability that your company needs. To achieve this requires three actions.
You need to have a profile of the minimum selling competencies that are needed by a new hire to sell the company’s products and/or services. Each selling competency that the company needs in a beginning salesperson must be known, prior to even looking for new hires.
You must screen each candidate to determine his or her current selling competencies via a written screening instrument. Ideally, this should be done before any interviews, as there is little to be gained from wasting valuable time interviewing a candidate who may look and sound good but lacks necessary competencies or has developed blockage or habits that will be counterproductive to successful selling. There are a number of screening tools that can identify such restricting elements and provide valid and reliable results.
With the company’s profile of criteria for the job at hand included in the candidate’s screening report, you now can see who stacks up to being a potential professional player and who does not.
At this point, a personal interview is in order for those who have demonstrated the potential for joining the team. Please note that the screening does not take the place of a personal interview. The screening and the interview together determine if the person is suitable for employment.
Should the person be hired, the manager of that person begins the critical process of integrating that person into the sales team.
Is there any baseball manager still employed who is ignorant of the strengths and weaknesses of his newly hired players? Can you imagine this manager taking the scout’s reports and tossing them in a drawer never to be looked at nor used?
Do you want to have your managers take screening reports that indicate each salesperson’s strengths and weaknesses and not use them to help the salesperson grow and succeed?
Sales managers who manage effectively not only know the strengths and weaknesses of each salesperson, they also use this information to enlighten the salesperson and work with him or her consistent with the needs identified in the screening report. The screening report is the starting point of a process that is designed to help the salesperson achieve ever-increasing results in shorter periods of time throughout his or her career.
Awareness on the manager’s part of the strengths and weaknesses of each new salesperson – this includes competencies, attitudes, limiting beliefs and habits that may, or may not, be supportive to successful selling. This will serve as a starting point for growing the salesperson to better fit the company’s needs.
Presentation and review of these competencies, attitudes, limiting beliefs and habits with the salesperson as a means of helping the salesperson to know and look objectively at his or her strengths and weaknesses. The salesperson must both understand and agree with the issues that need to be addressed and hurdled in a training program designed to gain greater results for the salesperson.
There is no other intellectual challenge in the world as difficult as being able to “turn around” and see yourself as others see you. Look at the selling statistics for any organization that employs salespeople. The old adage of ten percent of the sales force making ninety percent of the sales is not only true, but also statistically proven year in and out. What do these 10% of the salespeople have that give them 90% of the sales?
In every instance these salespeople know their strengths and weaknesses.
Top producers have the ability to review what has transpired in a selling situation as if they were watching a movie unfold. While they might not characterize it as a movie unfolding, they are capable of being able to “turn around” and see themselves as players on a stage.
The question then becomes, how do you develop this ability in someone or enhance this ability if it is already present? You start with the current state of the salesperson’s selling competencies from the screening report.
Each salesperson should receive a written profile that identifies his current selling competencies. This provides a blueprint for the salesperson and manager to embark on a journey through self-awareness and self-discipline toward greater mastery of selling competencies and as a result, greater production.
It should be noted that it is an extremely rare individual who will take action on his own to enhance strengths and reduce weaknesses. To depend on the belief that you have hired such a group of rare individuals is fallacious to the extreme. Successful growth and achievement of results requires both a commitment and a plan from management to work with each salesperson to understand and improve his profile of selling competencies.
Remember the baseball analogy at the beginning. The league-leading batter did not become the leading batter in a vacuum. He got there by a combination of his natural talent, his ability to understand his natural talent and the ability of his manager to take that talent and player’s understanding of his talent and develop both to a higher level of professionalism.
The same dynamic must occur if the salesperson is to improve his current level of selling competencies. It is not enough that the manager “knows” the strength and weaknesses. It is not enough that the salesperson “knows” the strengths and weaknesses.
The manager and the salesperson review their respective understanding of the salesperson’s selling competencies. Both individuals must agree on what the current situation is – the lack of a mutually agreed upon starting point is an agreement to fail.
The plan must be put in motion – training, coaching, practicing, briefing, de-briefing and ever improving upon a multiplicity of behaviors, attitudes, techniques and strategies – all focused upon increasing successful results – production, revenues, profits and income – in shorter periods of time for both the salesperson and the company.
Talk is cheap. Meetings are a dime a dozen. For every ten sales training plans that are made, nine sit in a drawer gathering dust. The “woulda, coulda” excuses are legion.
To quote Peter Goss, from his book Close to the Wind, written after he completed the 1996 Vendée Globe which has the following rules; non-stop, single handed, around the world solely under sail,
“Life hangs on a very thin thread and the cancer of time is complacency. If you are going to do something, do it now. Tomorrow is too late.”
Don’t let your business hang from a thin thread that is being eaten by the cancer of time. Being complacent is the same as accepting failure.
Execute the plan now. There is no other choice.
If the plan the sales manager and salesperson have agreed upon and have set forth to execute does not contain one final ingredient, it will fail.
In a static universe, where nothing changes and everything stays the same, it is simple to learn and predict what will happen today and tomorrow. Too often the agreed upon plan assumes it exists in such an unnatural environment. Too often the best-laid plans are the wreckage found on distant shores in a world that changes constantly.
Recognizing that business is not conducted in a static universe means that the plan developed by the sales manager and the salesperson must have scheduled times when both parties review the plan.
A plan that changes as times passes is an indication that both the sales manager and the salesperson are cognizant to the ever-changing business environment. Change is good. Change is necessary. Change must happen.
The analogy with how a successful and professional ball team puts together a winning team and how a successful and professional sales team puts together a winning team is evident. The congruency between a successful professional ball team and a successful professional selling team is perfectly matched.
It is also painfully evident that for the above to happen sales managers need skills beyond handling basic operational needs.
Managers need the skills to manage, coach and mentor the dynamics of salespeople. Such skills go well beyond the administrative talents that most managers bring to a company. Managers need help with being managers and developing the skills to work with salespeople to ensure one winning season after another.
It’s your decision, as the owner of the team, what type of team you want. To put it plainly, which of the following two statements do you want to make at the end of your financial year:
“We won.”
“Well, maybe next year we will win.”
The choice is simple. Complacency or action? You decide.
Cordially,
Steve Taback |
